Available too on Kobo, Barnes & Noble, OverDrive, Scribd, Odilo, Gardner’s Library and Baker & Taylor’s Axis 360 – whatever the heck all of those are when they are at home and sober. No idea, but they’re there. Paperback filtering through to all manner of retailers, but – as with all indie books – only on demand.

Written as a salute to the new society ruled by “social “”justice”” warriors” from their keyboards, by “white knights”, by “snowflakes”, and by all flavours of “political correctness” gone mad. Ugh. Vile phrases and words! Genuinely un-think not-speak.

The Blurb:

Ancient folk takes updated to reflect either true equality or modern notions of “equality”. Stories with a little less emphasis on the princess and a lot more emphasis on the prince, just for a change. Politically incorrect, entirely the opposite of “WOKE” and written in the only language that the author knows – florid and purple english English. Please regard the entire title as a “trigger warning”.

Cinderella. Prince Dave almost, very quite nearly, escapes the hypergamous ambitions of Cinderella. Indeed, had his motorbike been able to gather even just a little more speed he would have made it over the barbed wire and into Free Switzerland.

Pinocchio. What’s a boy to do when his penis is made of wood and the local priest marries him off to the village’s one and only sex worker? It’s not Pinocchio’s nose that stretches, it’s his little car’s brake cables.

Rapunzel. Poor Rapunzel, stuck in a high tower in the woods with bright red cropped hair and no cat.

Sleeping beauty. It is of course – and rightly so – impossible for the prince to wake Sleeping Beauty from her curse. Without constant enthusiastic consent the necessary peck on the cheek would be regarded as a serious assault.

Jack and the Soy-Beanstalk. Their cow seized and Jack’s mother in Ibiza with her supplier-lovers, Jack is censured by society over the sorry state of their garden and is forced to flee up the Baked Beans vomit stalk to a land in the sky where he actually meets his father for the first time.

Victoria Frankenstein’s Positively Adorable Monster. Starting with rebuilding the family cat Victoria and her assistant go on to show Mr God how the whole creation and re-creation of life thing really ought to be done, and they build…. the perfect woman.

Some giggles in there, I hope. Barbed giggles, cocking a snook at an “equality” industry that works for nothing of the sort while actually actively disrgarding or even encouraging some of the most egregious inequalities known to mankind.

I have other books that may move you to un-follow or un-friend me if this new title isn’t enough, and they’re all linked from the top menu bar under, cunningly, “My books“.

The Dog with the Bakelite Nose isn’t about dogs.

The Cat Wore Electric Goggles isn’t about cats.

[The opening words of both of those are ‘AWOOGAH! AWOOGAH!’ which, if nought else, ought to offer you some clue to their contents.

Cheerio, and thanks for the apocalypse was written and published before the apocalypse. This one does, at the last, feature a real dog from my past – Pipsqueak. In the company of two of television world’s most eminent “popular scientists” she is offered three wishes by a Lancashire genie – and makes better use of them than most. This is Pipsqueak, the (sadly, late) dog featured, and her pose tells you all about her deep respect for the human species:

Pipsqueak. A Queen among dogs. Had she but been possessed of an opposable thumb we would none of us have been here alive today.

Oh, and the latest short, Narrowboat Winter 2020 – Three Named Storms & a Pandemicis about narrowboats and storms and a pandemic.

Jus’ sayin’, is all.

So, in other news, life on the canal?

None.

Chin-chin., please do keep on keeping on (it annoys the Establishment so).